Music News

Dr. Carol Nies, Director of Orchestras at MTSU conducted performances of Il barbiere di Siviglia and Cavalleria rusticana and suites from Carmen, La Boheme, Don Giovanni and Le Nozze di Figaro at the 2015 Rome Festival. She also served as Director of the Nashville Summer Orchestral
Institute at the Blair school of Music.

Adjunct Professor Matt Lund's jazz quintet released a self-titled album last November called "The Lund McVey
Group." It is their first studio album and was recorded at MTSU's studio B. Lund
is an MTSU jazz guitar master's program graduate. Their saxophone player Jason McVey
received his bachelor's and master's degrees in jazz performance from MTSU, and their
bass player, Adam Bond, is an undergraduate alumnus of the MTSU jazz program. The
album contains ten of Lund's original jazz compositions. Please see www.reverbnation.com/lundmcveygroup for more information.

MTSU Guitar Faculty William Yelverton performed solo concerts and masterclasses during October and November 2014 at Mississippi
State University and at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC. Additionally, he presented
student workshops at Centennial High School in Franklin, TN and at the Evergreen Charter
School in Asheville, NC. He also performed at Adams Place retirement community where
he directs the "First Friday at Four" MTSU student concert series.

Susan Ramsay, adjunct instructor for Music in the Elementary Grades for MUED majors, presented
at NAfME (National Association for Music Education) on Tuesday and had over 100 people
attend her session. Titled "If You Build it, They will Move: Scaffolding in General
Music Class." The session incorporated challenging singing and movement games that
develop musical skill and concepts. Careful scaffolding, or process teaching, is need
to provide the right amount of challenge and success for students in general music
classes, and the session provided a model through the use of movement and singing
games.

Dr. Joseph E. Morgan, MTSU Assistant Professor of Music History, has been selected to present at the 9th International Conference for Interdisciplinary Musicology (CIM14) at the Staatliches
Institut für Musikforschung in Berlin, Germany. He will be presenting a comparative
study of the impact of technology on the development of the medieval motet and the
contemporary mashup to an international audience of musicologists and music technology
specialists.

Additionally, in September Dr. Morgan presented research that emerged from his recent
book to meetings of the Southwest and Midwest chapters of the American Musicological Society.

Tracey Phillips accepted the Instrumental Album of the Year during the 45th Annual Dove Awards Pre-Show at Lipscomb University on October 7, 2014 in Nashville, Tennessee. Tracey graduated from MTSU School of Music in 2009 earning a BM with concentration in Theory
Composition. While at MTSU, she traveled to Denver, Colorado to make a presentation on Convention-style
piano accompaniment at the Society of American Music's annual seminar, a very rare
feat for an undergraduate as most presenters are doctoral candidates or professors.

Phillips has lived and worked in Nashville since 1994 and has been featured on the
popular Gaither Homecoming videos. In addition, she has recorded and/or arranged for
a number of well-known Southern Gospel artists, including The Speers, The Perrys and,
most recently, Ernie Haase and Signature Sound. She has been nominated for Dove Awards
for her work on Daywind's instrumental series, and her own Christmas CD as well. She
has recorded with the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra in Prague, Czech Republic. She
composed original music for and performed for the movie "Billy, The Early Years,"
a full-length feature film recounting the early years of Billy Graham.

Phillips has taught and accompanied for many years at Ben Speer's Stamps Baxter School
of Music and the Alabama School of Gospel Music. She has also taught at the North
Georgia and Texas schools. She has recorded two solo cds and two duet cds with her
mother, Eloise, performing on piano and organ. Her solo piano arrangements are published
by Word Entertainment.

Dr. Cedric Dent, MTSU professor of music, has been selected to receive a 2013 Heritage Music Award
by the National Association of Negro Musicians, Inc. (NANM)! NANM was founded in 1919,
and is the country's oldest organization dedicated to the preservation, encouragement
and advocacy of all genres of the music of African Americans.

Dent will be accepting the award at the Annual Convention to be held at the Opryland
Hotel, Nashville, TN from July 28–August 1, 2013.

Additionally, he will be presenting some of his research from his upcoming book "Music,
Race and Church Doctrine: the Sound of Black Seventh-day Adventists" (working title)
during the convention.

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